Ep. 151 – Global Warming, Eco Anxiety, and Climate Distress with Nina Rao, Dekila Chungyalpa, & Allegra Lovejoy

Facing the anxiety caused by climate change, Nina Rao, Allegra Lovejoy, and environmentalist Dekila Chungyalpa, come together to find solutions.

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Nina Rao, Dekila Chungyalpa, and Allegra Lovejoy spend this episode discussing:

• The source of rising global temperatures
• Climate migrants and refugees
• The anthropocentric effect on the natural world
• Dekila’s conservation work
• How the value of nature has been consumed by economics
• Looking to India for answers on environmentalism
• The validity of anxiety surrounding the environmental crisis
• Reinforcing our communities for survival
• Contemplating our relationship with nature
• The privilege of having access to nature
• Coping with Eco Anxiety through mindfulness
• Joy as a means of increasing our resilience
• Kinship with the environment for a conservation strategy
• A brief practice in grounding and compassion for the earth

About Nina Rao:

Nina Rao is a devotional singer. She tours with Krishna Das, playing cymbals, singing, and acting as his business manager. Nina has two of her own albums, “Antarayaami – Knower of All Hearts” and “Anubhav”. Nina regularly leads kirtan, workshops, and retreats in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York and beyond. Keep up with Nina on her website.

“I’m not saying this is the solution for everything, but set aside land for natural habitat and wildlife. We’ve forgotten how to actually live with wildlife so we have to re-learn that, so until we do, we have to give them that space.” – Nina Rao

About Dekila Chungyalpa:

Dekila is the founder and director of the Loka Initiative. She is an accomplished environmental program director, with 20+ years of experience in designing and implementing global conservation and climate strategies and projects. Known as an innovator in the environmental field, Dekila has expertise in faith-led environmental and climate partnerships, biodiversity landscape and river basin strategy design, and community-based conservation. She began her career in 2001 working on community-based conservation in the Eastern Himalayas and went on to work on climate adaptation and free flowing rivers in the Mekong region for the World Wildlife Fund in 2004.

In 2008, she helped establish Khoryug, an association of over 50 Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and nunneries implementing environmental projects across the Himalayas under the auspices of His Holiness the Karmapa. In 2009, Dekila founded and led WWF Sacred Earth, a 5-year pilot program that built partnerships with faith leaders and religious institutions towards conservation and climate results in the Amazon, East Africa, Himalayas, Mekong, and the United States. She received the prestigious Yale McCluskey Award in 2014 for her work and moved to the Yale School of Environmental Studies as an associate research scientist, where she researched, lectured and designed the prototype for what is now the Loka Initiative. Dekila is originally from the Himalayan state of Sikkim in India and is of Bhutia origin.

Stay in tune with Dekila on Instagram and at The Loka Initiative

“I really believe that if we can have these dialogues where we show the the ecological interdependence, the karma of climate change, if we can show how it has happened, what karmic actions brought us here, then one of the interesting outcomes of that is that we can connect what people are already doing to environmental and climate solutions.” – Dekila Chungyalpa

About Allegra Lovejoy:

Allegra Lovejoy is a multifaith chaplain and writer. She is currently completing her MDiv at Yale Divinity School and holds a Masters in Environmental Management from Yale School of the Environment. She earned her BA from Princeton University in International Affairs and Public Policy, concentrating in conflict studies in the Middle East and South Asia. Learn more about Allegra here.

“We need both nature-based solutions and major reductions in emissions. That means the way we source energy, how much energy we generate and consume, how much stuff we generate and consume, how we grow food and how we travel.” – Allegra Lovejoy

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